In Sudan, a society that shuns unwed mothers, the tide is turning in favour of survival for hundreds of the infants formerly left to die in the streets or at a 'baby dump' in the capital.

Sharia law in Sudan demands that a woman who gives birth out of wedlock be lashed 100 times.

Along with official punishment comes lifelong shame for both mother and child. Rather than face such consequences, many women hide the pregnancy under their robes, deliver the baby in secret and abandon it to the streets.

In 2003, government figures show, babies were being abandoned to Khartoum streets at the rate of 110 a month. And in the five years from 1998 to 2003, roughly half of abandoned babies died before being found – some of dehydration, others of blood poisoning through the umbilical cord. A few were eaten by dogs.

Survivors usually ended up at the Maygoma institution for illegitimate babies, only to be treated as outcasts not worthy of care. During the same five years, of the 2,500 babies admitted to Maygoma, 2,100 died – a mortality rate of 84 per cent.

Maygoma was not an institution, critics later said; it was a "baby dump."

"When I came to this ministry at the end of 2002," says Abdullah Ibrahim, director general of social affairs for the state of Khartoum, "one of the major problems facing me was the problem of abandoned babies at Maygoma."

For 20 years, rulers of the Islamic Republic of Sudan have built a record of shocking indifference to the suffering of much of their own population.

UN agencies have estimated that at least 1 million people – and as many as 2 million – died in Khartoum's long war against the south that ended two years ago. In the devastated Darfur region, an estimated 200,000 people have perished in the last three years and Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir refuses to let UN troops intervene.

Maygoma represents another, if unintended, atrocity.

"Of all the victims of the regime, the unnamed and unloved babies of Maygoma were perhaps the most innocent and the most pathetic of all," writes Nicholas Coghlan, Canada's top diplomat in Khartoum from 2000 to 2003, in his book Far in the Waste Sudan.

"Most (caregivers) saw the babies as expendable products of sin, and if five or six died in a night because the duty nurse had slept through their feeding times, it was shrugged off as the will of God."

But there is also a compassionate side to official Sudan.

When word of what was happening at Maygoma leaked out in late 2002, government workers responded with urgency and an almost complete lack of defensiveness. No criminal charges were laid, but minister Ibrahim and others raised the alarm with UNICEF and other agencies, openly seeking foreign expertise.

Ibrahim's inquiries eventually led to an obscure English aid agency – Hope and Homes for Children – that was to prove central to revolutionizing attitudes and policies toward out-of-wedlock babies in Sudan. Based in Salisbury, near Stonehenge, the agency specializes in closing orphanages and getting children into families.

Its experience had been mainly in Eastern Europe – the Balkans, Albania, Ukraine and especially Romania – but in 1998 the agency also opened several group homes for street children in Khartoum as a step toward reuniting them with their war-displaced parents.

"It didn't look too bad," she recalls of her first visit to the cluster of low-slung buildings, founded in 1961, in the city's southern Khartoum 2 district. "Only 83 babies (in residence at the time) – a simple problem to solve."

Then, somebody told her about the deaths.

"That was a shock," she says.

From meticulously kept records, Mulheir asked that abandonment and mortality numbers be compiled – statistics that nobody could dispute and that were to prove a powerful tool in moving others to action.

She also helped strike a special Maygoma task force. It included government officials, civic leaders, imams and agencies such as UNICEF and the French branch of Médecins Sans Frontières, which agreed to run the institution temporarily.

And that September she led an intensive 12-day study trip to Romania for a dozen people, including Ibrahim.

"In the beginning, he thought institutions were the best thing, and he thought, `Single mothers – you just don't talk about them,'" Mulheir recalls. "But by the middle of the (study trip), he was saying, `Okay, we need to look at what services we can develop for single mothers in Khartoum.'"

In the end, the group developed a plan for closing Maygoma.

"We decided that every child has the right to a family, that every child should live in a family instead of an institution – that's the best place," Ibrahim says. "The community is the best place for the child to be protected."

Mulheir's team members worked on several fronts simultaneously. Beginning in early 2004, they launched an awareness campaign urging that unwed mothers be helped, not punished. They targeted tribal leaders, judges, police chiefs and the media, especially newspaper columnists.

They also persuaded hospitals to provide emergency care for abandoned babies and to allow mothers to leave babies in hospitals instead of the street.

And they consulted religious scholars and imams, who in early 2006 issued a religious decree, or fatwa. It interpreted sharia law to mean that a judge or police officer cannot order an unwed mother to be lashed, and said it is the mother's choice whether of not to be punished for her sin.

It also said a child is best off staying with the birth mother. If the mother cannot keep her child, the state must pay for an alternative family to house the child, a view consistent with a 14th-century Qur'anic interpretation, the clerics explained.

The fatwa had no legal effect. Sudanese law, based on an earlier interpretation of sharia, still demands that a woman who gives birth out of wedlock be lashed – in private, not public, and as though the person doing the lashing is holding a book under his arm.

"But the fatwa lays the groundwork for legal reform," says Hope and Homes Sudan director Farid Idris. And its moral weight, he adds, goes a long way toward opening the way to other changes.

By June 2004, Hope and Homes for Children had trained 100 social workers, hired the best 60 and established Sudan's first official foster-care and adoption programs.

Strictly speaking, adoption does not exist in Islam. A child taken into a home does not acquire the family name and retains a separate identity, with fewer rights in regards to inheritances and other matters.

In place of "foster care" and "adoption," the agency created the terms "emergency alternative families" and "permanent alternative families."

Under the programs, if the identity of the birth mother is known, efforts are made to reunite the child with the mother or her relatives. Otherwise, abandoned babies are placed in an emergency alternative family, usually for a three-month term.

According to Hope and Homes, the government pays such a family for care at about one-quarter of the cost of keeping a child at Maygoma, and the list of willing takers currently exceeds need.

Ideally, the child is then placed with a permanent family. Sometimes, an emergency family bonds with the child and applies to keep the baby. At other times, another family is found.

Khartoum has plenty of childless women. The Sudanese custom of female genital mutilation often leads to sterility, creating a pool of women who might adopt if the stigma against out-of-wedlock children were eased.

"Sudan has a high infertility rate, one of the highest, and one reason is female genital mutilation," Hope and Homes' Idris says. One condition when taking a female child is a commitment not to allow the procedure on the girl.

Gradually, the effect of the programs began to show.

By the end of last year, the mortality rate at Maygoma had dropped to 23 per cent, from the 2003 rate of 84 per cent.

Instead of the 83 babies of Mulheir's visit, there were hundreds. And as families were found for them, Maygoma began to empty out again.

On one recent day, 22 babies left Maygoma in the care of 21 foster mothers. One mother, Nima Hassan, took home twins.

It was an emotional scene. All the babies were tiny, just days old. One adoptive mother, on seeing her new child, instantly broke down.

"These children did nothing wrong," she said, holding the baby close.

Another bent to kiss the baby in her arms, saying, "She tastes like honey to me."

The numbers speak for themselves. Since mid-2004, the alternative-family programs have served more than 2,000 children. Of them, 163 Maygoma babies have been reunited with their birth mothers.

Through social-worker intervention, another 227 newborns were kept by their mothers rather than abandoned.

Unwed mothers have started to abandon their babies at hospitals rather than in the street. Between 2003 and 2006, street abandonment dropped to 18 a month from an estimated 55.

Babies found on the street are taken to hospitals, then passed to waiting families.

Maygoma is scheduled to close forever on or about April 30 and group homes are being prepared for 29 the institution's children needing permanent special care.

Hope and Homes for Children continues to be the lead donor for the foster-care and adoption programs, with a commitment of nearly $1.6 million for 2007.

UNICEF still contributes, the state has promised to increase its financial responsibility and long-term support through Islamic charities is being established.

Much has been accomplished in a short time. More remains to be done.

In total, newborn babies are currently being abandoned in Khartoum at a rate of 45 to 50 a month.

Star reporter John Goddard recently returned from a four-week trip to Sudan on a media fellowship co-sponsored by the Canadian Association of Journalists and the Canadian International Development Agency.

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